“We’re definitely doing our best to console the poilus,” cried my aunt. “Isn’t that right, Yolande?”
“We write letters,” nodded Yolande enthusiastically. “We wait and we hope, and we write. That is woman’s patriotic duty. Those lads are crazy about us…” They nodded simultaneously. With their plucked and accentuated eyebrows their faces were like two masks.
My uncle stretched his fingers and studied his nails at length. “Another reason, monsieur, why peace must come soon. I hope those poor devils don’t conceive the plan of visiting their marraines… They’d have the shock of their lives.”
The aunts protested.
“I’ve posted your latest epistle, Yolande, child,” my uncle sighed. “A lot can be said of you, but you’re not exactly a voluptuous brunette.”
My mother raised her right eyebrow, her moral eyebrow, meaningfully, but said nothing. She also wrote. In a much more businesslike fashion than the aunts. Letters about the energy it required to keep hearth and home more or less ticking over. “Her soldiers” replied to her communications faithfully, if fairly briefly, and usually the correspondence was short-lived. Probably her epistles offered too few illusions, and I myself was not allowed to write to soldiers who were total strangers. My task was to keep family deeper in France informed of our day-to-day lives. Corresponding with lonely trench warriors struck my mother as too risky. “It starts with sweet words on paper,” she once said archly, “and ends with lots of panting and exclamation marks on the sofa…”
“Peace,” sighed my uncle in resignation. “When the money’s gone or the people revolt. Or conversely when the people are gone and the money gets restless. A war on credit needs peace sooner or later…”
My husband nodded and mumbled, more to himself than to us: “Lives are cheap these days…”
After coffee we walked through the Lost Wood. My mother had told me to show him round a little. I led him along the winding paths through the tree trunks upward, to the edge of the treeline, from where you could look out eastwards over the landscape.
We did not say much, after the cooing of the aunts. We sometimes looked at each other from the side and smiled shyly when our glances crossed. Of course my mother had taken the opportunity to question him at table: what his father did — a doctor in a London suburb. Whether he had brothers and sisters — he was an only child. His mother? — died early, he grew up with an aunt in the north, because his stepmother didn’t like him very much. She was moved, I could see. He was now given some of the love she usually reserved for my brother.
I liked his silences. A lone wolf. Learnt to fend for himself from an early age. Busy surviving, in the lee, the shade, the twilight. When I got engaged to him, my father took me aside and asked me — the cliché blared round our ears — if I loved him.
“I love his tragic quality,” I replied.
My father asked if that was enough.
I kept the answer under consideration.
*
When we reached the top we stopped on the verge of grass under the stragglers of the tall trees, next to the field of barley that rolled down at our feet, and looked out over the countryside. Clouds hung almost motionless over the fields and wooded banks, the distant roofs. When there was an east wind we could sometimes hear the thunder of the distant front line at home, weaker than when it blew from the west, which it usually did. On clear days you could see weak plumes of smoke rising all the way on the horizon, and at night there were vague flashes of light, as if the same storm were always hanging over the earth. That afternoon it was peaceful and quiet. The wind sang in the stalks, listlessly stirring the ears.
He came and stood next to me and sought my hand.
I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “Perfect setting for a kiss, monsieur?”
“Definitely…”
It wasn’t a kiss to wax lyrical about, more a short confirmation, almost businesslike, of the bond between us there had been at our first meeting. He let go of me afterwards and stood with his back to me, with his hands in his pockets looking out over the landscape.
“Looks like England,” I said. “But with a French accent…”
He turned round. “A bit like you then…” he smiled, over his shoulder.
HE SHOWED ME the fronts, later that summer. We had waited until my mother had gone with her two sisters-in-law to see relations near Paris for a few days, a trip that was quite difficult to get under way, and I approached my uncle with the excuse that “Monsieur Heirbeir” had invited me to the coast for two days because he had some leave.
“Ah, une affairette…” he had exclaimed, as he pushed back his chair and stood up from behind his desk in the library with an excited “Finalement!”, since his yearly attempt to subject me to a subversive education was obviously finally beginning to bear fruit.
“Two days at the seaside, two days at the seaside,” he said, pretending to sulk. “It’s a start, I assume. Be careful, ma fille, but without taking it too far… I have to say that, as ambassador of Her Maternal Excellency, but the simple libertine in me has his rights too…”
He came to pick me up early in the morning, in an open-topped car; the day was still unpolluted and smelt of grass and dew. He did not drive into the courtyard but waited a little way off to avoid the maid, Madeleine, who might be on the prowl. He had everything with him to make the cover credible: the cameras, the bags, the papers; permis for the cameras, for myself, passes for this and that, where necessary illustrated with the photos he had taken of me a few weeks earlier in the church — I only wondered much later, without ever asking him for clarification, whether he had planned everything, whether our re-encounter had been so accidental. Guests were to visit the front zone that day. We never drive in a group, he said, but spread out. “I’m risking my neck, Helen.”
I replied that what he was risking would be a trifle beside my mother’s wrath if she should ever get to hear of our adventure — she never found out, never believed anything except that I went to the coast with “ce drôle Monsieur Heirbeir”, and there somewhere in the dunes or in a boarding house of dubious quality threw away my honour, more or less with the blind-eyed consent of her dearly beloved brother, against whom she declared a winter of discontent which lasted all the longer because she perhaps realized that she had lost the battle for my soul for ever.
The shock when, after driving for a while along deserted roads and seeing only peasants on their way to the fields, we suddenly found ourselves in a stream of soldiers, the dust, the smell of sweat and bodies, the silence, the tread of all those soles over the land and the cobbles — a stream of arms and heads, trunks and shoulders that sucked us along into the arterial system of the war, thrust along the uncountable individual blood cells which made their way between the high verges under the branches of undergrowth and trees.
Here and there, at a bottleneck or where the road made a sharp bend, the flood was checked and we could only drive at walking place. Then he manoeuvred the car between the troops, none of whom paid the slightest attention, as if they were totally focused on their destination — or perhaps it was just their limbs that were going mechanically on, their muscles and joints were taking them blindly northwards, and their thoughts were tarrying meanwhile with what was behind them, what they could not let go of. My husband shook his head. “They live in soldier-time,” he said. “That’s all.”
When gaps appeared in the mass we could accelerate briefly, slaloming, and pass smaller troops of soldiers, not too quickly. No one waved or laughed or whistled, not a voice was raised to call out hello or even to swear. Elsewhere the road clogged up again, and the mass became so impenetrable that we drifted almost automatically towards the side of the road, and I then stood up in the car—“Careful, my lovely,” he said — and through the dust that was thrown up from the soft sand by all those soles and that drifted in a haze above the figures, caught a first glimpse of the face of the war. It did not show a uniform face, rather a countenance that manifested itself in a thousand facets, a face that was a parasite on all those faces, younger and older, one clearer than the other, which I saw as little more than separate noses, cheeks, eyelids and lips under the grey powder of the roads looming up out of that veil of dust, with which the face of this war made itself up — not to look at me but to look through me with a hollow stare.